Applying Fundamental Quality Control Concepts

Your organization can implement several fundamental quality control processes to ensure that you produce or deliver a high-quality product or service. The following sections present the information you need to determine how you can integrate quality control processes into your organization.

Introducing quality control to your business

The introduction of a quality control process into an organization can be a major shock to its system. The following components are crucial if you want to lessen the shock and gain acceptance within your organization:

_ Advertise acceptance of the program from important stakeholders within your organization.

_ Give communication power to a sponsor who can articulate the need for change and who has the political power to gain compliance when required.

_ Communicate the reasons for the change and the benefits it will bring to everyone in the organization.

_ Train employees in the new ways of the organization. You want workers doing the right things consistently because success helps to gain support.

Like most other changes, quality control is best introduced in small bits. One way to do this is to create a pilot project that allows you to make a small change to a small part of your process to see the change’s effect. If the results are good, you can implement the change on a wider basis; if the change is bad, you’ve limited the damage done.

Listening to your customers

An important concept in quality control is listening to the customer; we call this listening to the voice of the customer (the VOC). Although this task seems pretty simple, you may find that your customers don’t know exactly what they need, or they can’t articulate their needs. The customer typically has three desires:

_ They want it good.

_ They want it fast.

_ They want it cheap.

Of course, in the real world, consumers seldom get all three, so you need to identify what’s most important in your customers’ buying decisions, and you need to make sure you satisfy those needs.

You have several ways to hear the VOC:

_ You can ask by handing out questionnaires, conducting interviews, reviewing complaints, holding focus groups, reviewing purchasing patterns, and interviewing field personnel.

_ You can borrow good ideas from your competitors. Don’t be afraid to use good ideas, no matter where you find them.

_ You can use a good customer relationship management (CRM) system, which is a handy tool for gathering and analyzing data about customers.

Measuring your quality

The old management saying “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” rings especially true in quality control. A good measurement system helps you to know where you’ve been and where you’re going. Customers typically require that you measure certain attributes of your product or service against their specifications. Your job is to determine what to measure, how to measure it, and when to measure it.

Employee training is critical to ensure that everyone involved in your process measures the same specifications in the same way. You also need to collect data in a usable format so that you can analyze it to determine the effectiveness of your quality process. The effectiveness of your quality process is directly related to the quality of your data collection and analysis process. If you don’t have good data, you can’t make good decisions. Check out Chapters 7 and 8 for the nitty-gritty on measuring your current quality process.